Secret World of Butterflies by Courtney Sina Meredith

Author:Courtney Sina Meredith [Muriel Knox Doherty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2000-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

We were invited by the Central Jewish Committee, Culture Department to its first concert the other evening. It was held in connection with their New Year Festivities on 15th September, for which we are endeavouring to collect sufficient candles for each patient to have one on his locker.

Although tragic, it was very well done. Most of the scenes and plays depicted episodes from their Concentration Camp Life and their persecution. The Gael (Messiah), by Emile Bernhart, was depicted by a Jew hiding in a cellar, and The Mother’s Dance, by Doli Kotz, showed a mother in a Concentration Camp after the death of her baby. The Tailors, by Lulbak, with eight performers, told a tale of past and future, and the entire company produced the Kazet Theatre—showing how the inmates of a Concentration Camp kept their spirits up with music after the SS guards had left them without food or light.

We knew it was all so real—and what suffering!

There certainly is a great national awakening to their own rights and one wonders where it will lead them—I feel many who have not known these people under these conditions may never understand.

I am looking forward to the food parcels which I hear are arriving shortly in large numbers from my friends in Australia. We have sufficient food ourselves from our Army rations; margarine and occasionally butter, no eggs or egg powder, nor fresh milk, but plenty of potatoes and occasional fresh vegetables and always vitamin tablets. Some Australian luxuries for the sick patients will be lovely, but we ourselves are very well fed. I tried to get a special issue of butter for the UNRRA nurses on the grounds that they were nursing Tb patients but was unsuccessful.

Life is exceedingly interesting and exceedingly busy at present-never a dull moment. Weddings, christenings, dances, concerts, sports and open-air entertainment—always something going on in and around the Hospital.

My German progresses slowly, my French conversation with Mademoiselle Jorlan, Welfare Officer of the Vatican Mission, is grand as long as I remain silent, and you can imagine how voluble my chats with my Italian godson were. Our housekeeper, who arrived so late, has done practically nothing since she came and is leaving tomorrow, complete with dog! It is apparently taken for granted that I shall be in charge of the Mess, but I have been firm in asserting that the Matron is not responsible for a mixed mess (in more ways than one) and certainly I’m much too busy to be conducting a residential restaurant for every odd UNRRA transient driver or member on leave who comes along to have a look at Belsen, as they frequently do!

The electricity and water still go off two or three times a day, and the light is failing now so will finish this.

Later

The trial of the SS man from Belsen opened in Luneberg on 17th September. The one we had under double guard in hospital with post—typhus complications has been transferred there. He is a perfect specimen of brutality.

The curfew tolls at 10.

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